Parting the waters again.... Charles Murtaugh has an interesting post on divine intervention in evolution again. Quantum Computing and Biology This is a response to Steve, too long to paste into the comments section (and I was too lazy to split it over two posts.). "Therefore, despite your outright rejection of McFadden's hypothesis (plus your curious assertion that a professor in molecular biology "doesn't know what he's talking about" - hell even Behe knows what he's talking about, he's just seriously biased), I will maintain an open mind. " I'm sorry if I came across as insensitive, Steve. I think you're a smart guy, and that this (being out of your field) might have seemed reasonable. But the fact is that McFadden doesn't know what he's talking about. I was wrong in the above when I stated that only a physicist or creationist could have come up with McFadden's theory. The third possibility is a fellow like Mcfadden - a biologist who doesn't understand the physics behind what he's proposing. I don't think that reflexive respect for McFadden because he's a molecular biologist is justified - his ideas must be judged on their merits. And in this case, there are none. I read his paper, and my objection stands. Let me give more detail: A student of quantum mechanics (or of quantum computing) is aware that quantum superposition states such as the one described are fragile . It is quite difficult to prevent quantum states from becoming entangled with their environment through a measurement and thereby decohering. One must understand that proteins are macromolecules , huge things that are comprised of many thousands of atoms and hundreds of amino acid subunits. Their synthesis does not happen in the blink of an eye - much of the cell's machinery is devoted to making them. Even to add a single amino acid requires the intervention of the whole ribosomal apparatus, a tRNA, ATP to fuel the process, and many other cellular components besides. The idea that an amino acid somewhere in the middle of the chain could somehow be added without interacting with its environment until the protein's interaction with lactose - which is the essence of what McFadden proposes - is frankly ludicrous. The key assumption that McFadden makes - that mutant and non-mutant states are indistinguishable to the cell until interacting with lactose - is incorrect, because mutant and non-mutant states are distinguished by their (slightly) different synthesis and folding processes . In other words, there is no way that the wave function could remain coherent enough to present a superposition of active and inactive protein in interacting with lactose. Even more damningly, if McFadden's hypothesis had any merit, we wouldn't see the phenomenon isolated to this special case - the "adaptive mutation" effect cannot be duplicated with a different strain, a different plasmid, or a different selection (e.g. His). It's an artifact of this particular system, as described in great detail by Roth. I will agree that the potential of adaptive mutation itself is no challenge to a materialist worldview. The main barrier so far has been the development of a sensor/actuator feedback system sophisticated enough to take in environmental stresses and convert them into a modification of the appropriate genes. This has been achieved to some degree in eukaryotes with sexual selection, and will be achieved to a greater degree when we develop genetic engineering. However, the mechanisms proposed for prokaryotes (such as random mutagenesis of the genome, debunked by a back of the envelope calculation) simply do not hold water. McFadden's paper may use the language of physics and biology, but his neglect of fundamental principles makes it akin to a treatise on a perpetual motion machine. Just because it "sounds like science" doesn't mean it's scientifically sound.